The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Book

    Please pardon me, as I accidentally skipped over Murder on the Links, it is because I hate golf, and not a commentary on the LIV-PGA Tour merger. Although, if I might digress for a second, if you are a principled golf star with a few golf star buddies, I whole heartedly endorse you starting your own tour. 

    And now, on to The Man in the Brown Suit...

After a performance of a beautiful dancer, Nadina, enjoys the accolades of a successful performance after her nightly routine in Paris. She greets an admirer, and possibly her lover, Serguis Paulovitch a "Russian." They discuss how they will double cross their crime boss, a shadowy man called the Colonel. 

From here the book splits into two different types of first person narrators, that of our heroine, Anne Beddingfeld and the diary entries of an extremely lazy peer Sir Eustace Pedler. 

Anne is a recently orphaned young woman of about 20 who is yearning for adventure. While in the Tube waiting for a train, she witnesses a horrific accident. A man, smelling strongly as mothballs, falls into the 3rd rail and another man, proclaiming to be a doctor exams the body and declares the first man dead. Then promptly leaves. Anne notices the "doctor" has dropped a couple of paper and chases him down to return them. When he doesn't stop, she notices the papers, a strange scrap of paper with the name Killmorden Castle and an order to view a rental property (owned by Peddler), smell of mothballs. 

A woman's body is found Peddler's rental house the next day and Anne seizes the chance to have an adventure, but only after Scotland Yard refused to take her seriously. The best clue to the identity of the murderer is a witness who saw the Man in the Brown Suit.  She manages to get hired on as a correspondent for a tabloid rag, and follows the clues. Along the way, she figures out the dead woman, the dead man and the Man in the Brown Suit are all agents of the Colonel.

She meets, Pedler, his cadre of mysterious secretaries which includes a man wanted for murder, a man who is lying about vacationing in Italy, and a woman who may be fomenting unrest in South Africa, Mrs. Blair, a bored middle aged woman on vacation from her husband, a vicar named Mr. Chichester, and Colonel Race, a man who may or may not be in His Majesty's Secret Service. 

My Thoughts

This book is perhaps the breeziest of the early Christie reads to date. Anne Beddingfeld leaps off the stage, even if she is a little bit at odds with herself. The villain, is appropriately villainous and a complete liar, even when we are afforded an intimate look into his mind. 

Here we see Christie playing artfully with first person narrative. And Anne, positively radiates off the page. And Sir Eustace is extremely funny. There are several passages from the book that might have come from the personal reminiscences of one my relatives, namely my oldest child or my father. Both have the same kind of tongue in cheek approach to life. 

As a spy thriller goes, the plot is not too, too unbelievable, but it does stretch credulity in places, but in a way that makes it fun. I think this is my biggest take away from Christie's work, she was a ton of fun. I feel like in tone, no other writer I have read is as concerned about whether or not the reader is having fun. 

How Much My Library Card Save Me

Here we have something interesting. This book is among the oldest physical copies I have read, Somewhere in my community there either is, or was, someone who corrects the mysteries. This is very apparent in some of the Anne Perry mysteries, because for some unknown reason, they keep getting published where the continuity editor has made a mistake and the wrong character is credited with the action. I saw this earlier in the year, in a book I have not yet read for this project called Slaves of Obsession. But that was not the first time I had checked out an Anne Perry book and saw it. So I know it happens. In this book, Agatha Christie switches through a couple of characters really quickly in a scene and it can be confusing. When I got to this page, I saw the two character names underlined in pencil in the book. And sure enough, even though the characters were underlined, it was difficult to read. However, upon a second reading, it became clear what that mystery reader was doing. It saved me a good two minutes of rereading the passage to understand it. As I am reading so many books back to back to back from my library, and so many of them are coming right off the shelves of my library, the physical books themselves are beginning to tell a story. A story I might not have noticed except for the fact that I am blogging this project. 

This book, as you might be able to tell from the photos, in another one of the leatherette editions circa the mid 1980s, is my guess. Again, I checked this book out as one of several, so it took a little sleuthing to figure out this book, perhaps because it is less popular, has a savings price of $12. 

This Book                             $12.00

This Summer                       $116.99